1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the conversion of a solid, hydrocarbonaceous material to valuable products. In one aspect, the invention relates to the liquefaction of coal while in another aspect it relates to the production of high-grade fuel and valuable chemical feedstocks.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The art is replete with processes for converting solid, hydrocarbonaceous materials, such as coal, to mixtures of gaseous and liquid products. The Synthoil process, developed at the U.S. Bureau of Mines and described by Yavorsky et al. in Chem. Eng. Progress, 69, (3), 51-2 (1973), the H-Coal process, developed by Hydrocarbon Research, Inc. and described in a series of patents including Johanson, U.S. Pat. No. Re 25,770, Schuman et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,321,393 and Wolk et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,338,820, and the Solvent-Refined Coal (SRC) processes I and II developed by the Gulf Mineral Resources Co. and described in "Recycle SRC Prcessing for Liquid and Solid Fuels", presented at 4th Int. Conf. on Coal Gasification, Liquefaction and Conversion to Electricity, Univ. of Pittsburgh (Aug. 2-4, 1977), are representative. The Synthoil and H-Coal processes are generally characterized by a fixed or ebullated catalytic bed. While these and similar art processes are generally effective for their intended purpose, they do have inherent features that are generally considered undesirable from the perspectives of efficiency and convenience. For example, the art processes frequently require specially designed equipment, incur extensive down-time for removal of spent catalyst followed by reloading and pretreating fresh catalyst, suffer deactivation of the catalyst by components of the feed material, incur loss of catalyst fines to the process product, suffer occlusion of the catalyst by the feed material and incur caking or plugging of the process equipment by catalyst particles.
Since the SRC I process is noncatalytic and the SRC II process is pseudocatalytic (ash is recycled to enhance coal conversion), these processes generally avoid the inherent deficiencies of catalytic systems. However, both SRC I and II report relatively low feed throughputs.